Prawfs: Legal Commentary

Posted on February 26, 2009
You may have heard about the post-game press conference exchange between a Connecticut political reporter and UConn men's basketball coach Jim Calhoun. Here's the clip: Calhoun raises the following justifications for his salary: I want to retire some day...

Copeland on Obama and Religion

Posted on February 26, 2009
The University of Denver Law Review has just published, online anyway, an interesting symposium called Obama Phenomena: A Special Issue on the Election of President Barack Obama. (I would have gone with Phenomenon, but I guess the title signals that the symposium is looking at multiple phenomena involved in the election...

Paging Stanley Fish

Posted on February 26, 2009
Via Facebook, here's a story for those who are interested in university free speech and academic freedom issues. I will try (unsuccessfully, I suspect) to refrain from editorializing as I describe the case. I've read some related news items, but I'm not vouching for the factual accuracy of the description of the story at the Facebook link...

Law Professor Travel Budgets: Ritz, or Rats?

Posted on February 26, 2009
I remember hearing a law professor tell a story a few years back about Haves and Have Nots. He had depleted his travel budget (he'd had a good year) and was invited to speak at a law conference to be held at a lavish hotel. But his dean wouldn't give him any more travel money...

Some Thoughts On Imposing Tobacco Taxes

Posted on February 25, 2009
N.B. This post is by Stephen D. Sugarman, new grandfather and the Traynor Prawf at UC Berkeley Law.To help fund health insurance for children in working-class families, Congress just raised the federal cigarette tax from $.39 a pack to slightly over $1/pack...

Pleasant Grove City v. Summum

Posted on February 25, 2009
The Supreme Court handed it down today. Summum lost. And it was unanimous -- as one somewhat obnoxious but yet ruggedly attractive commentator predicted. I've read through it once now. The majority opinion strikes me as quite sensible. It stays well within existing doctrine, and avoids unnecessary and fractious issues (which I actually go into in the above post)...

Swearing in class

Posted on February 25, 2009
One of the distinctive features of the dialogue in HBO?s series Deadwood was its complexity. It?s not that common to hear dependent clauses on TV, much less dependent clauses within dependent clauses. So why was the show so popular? Why were people willing to listen to characters who talk the way Jane Austen writes? The reason was another unique feature of the show?s dialogue (one that can?t be found in Jane Austen), namely the unprecedented use of profanity...

Advocating Terrorism

Posted on February 25, 2009
Call me crazy, but isn't this advocating terrorism against the United States? And why does Glenn Beck keep saying people have been "disenfranchised"? I don't understand. Didn't more people vote in this election than any other -- the highest percentage since 1960? Why wasn't he talking about this in 2000, when the candidate who got 500,000 more popular votes was denied a state recount by the Supreme Court? I know Beck expresses disbelief at what he's hearing, and he's talking about some "hypothetical" in 2014, but methinks he doth protest too much...

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